Former UK Trade envoy, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor
You would think that there would be someone, anyone, who knew enough about the Royal Family, who knew Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor well enough who could have said to him quietly,
‘Molesting underage girls is not a good look for a Prince of the Realm, sire……’
But the bigger fallout of the Epstein saga is that it confirms what history has told us. ‘Elites’ are often toxic; their default is ‘one rule for them’ and a different rule for everyone else, and they don’t like this being known amongst the wider populations they effectively control, and they sure as hell will fight against any notion of accountability to those populations.
From there it is only a step to observe that human biology hard wires (most?) men to value feminine physical attractiveness and (most?) women to value economic substance. There is nothing substantially new here either.
Some ugly men will have no issue treating that beauty as a disposable trinket, and some ugly women will have no issue with the ugly men providing their material prosperity, as long as they do keep providing. The only novelty is that we have so much information underlining the fact and that the charade continued long after everyone knew what was going on, including a range of intelligence services.
And the scope. Leading politicians, business leaders from the US and elsewhere, institutional elites, bankers, magnates, actors, rappers, academics, and scientists. All part of a global network of people who thought it was okay to inveigle and intimidate young women from desperate backgrounds.
All thought it essentially a side dish of entitlement to go with a myriad of deals and little favours to help the wheels of the elite keep on eliting on.
For that is where the relevance of Epstein really kicks in. His networks of people weren’t primarily about exploiting underage girls. They were about ‘doing deals’ enabling tax avoidance, the dispersal of risk to the unknowing, the avoidance of accountability for financial transactions, going outside of international sanctions, and not being a counterparty as the financial structures of the age imploded.
He was close to the funds that blew apart Bear Stearns in 2008 and from there triggered the GFC and subsequent monetary smothering of the global economy.
Depending on what you read he was involved in some way with someone’s intelligence and was more than once presumed to have political cover. He had walked away from literal Ponzi schemes, rigged financial schemes, and fraudulent ratings and relocated financial companies to the lowest taxation domicile he could find—which also happened to become an island of trauma for young women and easy titillation for those travelling the ‘Lolita Express’.
These were almost solely wealthy and influential men, but they were often enabled by wealthy and influential women too.
The tragedy is that not a single person used their influence to bring the issue to authorities in a meaningful way. These titans of the corporate jungle, the powerful and elite, the really important—they could make observations about his credibility or integrity amongst themselves but didn’t have the cojones to do something about it. All in a household run by Ghislaine Maxwell with the integrity and veracity and duty of care for the service providers of a ‘Service Delivery’ function in the public services somewhere.
The tragedy from here is that while everyone walked away from having known Epstein years ago, the other implications of the network remain unaddressed, in a sea of complexity and departed people, which will likely never be examined.
Certainly Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor would appear to be being set up to account for what he has been party to, but there is now a whiff of him being tossed to the wolves of accountability to distract attention from whatever else can be discerned from the vast trove of information about whatever he was up to.
Anyone thinking he might have been at the centre of the sole network of people undertaking such activities only needs to consider the documentation placed in the public domain a decade ago relating to the Panamanian legal firm Mossack Fonseca, showing that some of those connected with Epstein had other connections and other business interests with people who weren’t interested in underage women. But they were still about avoiding taxation and accountability and still involved numerous public officials—including in Australia.
He appears to have had little direct involvement with Australia apart from some sort of interest in Paul Keating’s daughter and some distant support with the campaign to do something about Kevin Rudd’s plan to tax mining wealth after 2008.
But the toxic elite he enabled and was part of are direct beneficiaries of the policy mysteries of contemporary Australia.
People like them are directly responsible for why Australia has such expensive homes, why Australia has the highest rate of employment casualization in the OECD, why Australia takes such an outsized immigration intake, why Australia has taken so long to do something about money inflows to Australia speculating in Australian housing, and the morphing of Australian superannuation into an intergenerational bequest scheme benefitting primarily the uber affluent.
These are all manifestations of toxic polity more interested in themselves and maintaining a stance of being unaccountable to both proper regulation and the obvious preferences of the electorate.
The involvement of Epstein in CDO trades, mezzanine financing, and ratings manipulation, leaving others holding the bag when things went wrong, is no different from loading a nation up with private debt, bloating it with public debt and government-funded employment, and strolling away when the edifice ceases to work.
The pain is elsewhere; that is all these people are interested in, and they can make money off it.
These people and their enablers will keep asking us for a policy back rub, and they shape our economic experience, even if they have left our teenage girls alone.